Fire-stick farming is a term coined by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969 to describe the practice of Indigenous Australians where fire was used regularly to burn vegetation to facilitate hunting and to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area.

Fire-stick farming had the long-term effect of turning scrub into grassland, increasing the population of nonspecific grass eating species like the kangaroo. The ecological disturbance caused by fire-stick farming has been implicated in the extinction of the Australian megafauna.

In wet and dry sclerophyll forests, firestick farming opened the canopy and allowed germination of understory plants necessary for increasing the carrying capacity of the local environment for browsing marsupials.

See also

• Controlled burn
• Slash and burn

References

• Jones, R. 1969. Fire-stick Farming. Australian Natural History, 16:224
• Miller, G. H. 2005. Ecosystem Collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a Human Role in Megafaunal Extinction. Science, 309:287-290